Subject: Destroying UPDF will create Iraq?-----This MUST BE DONE! Sent: Friday, February 4, 2005 3:42 AM OPINION
Shaban Bantariza
Destroying UPDF will create Iraq
What will kill this country will not come from outside it. It is from within ourselves. We Ugandans seem to be our own problem most of, if not all, the time.
Even when outsiders cause us to build two dams on the same water point and eventually the water is not enough to power the two dams, after injecting in huge amounts of our meagre resources, still the problem is primarily ours. Outsiders only take advantage of us.
Just like some of our traditional chiefs actively and selfishly participated in the slave trading of their own subjects in exchange for trinkets and other ornaments, today, some of our citizens with selfish and misguided ambitions are still enticing their own children and voters into rebellions, hoping to use these as ladders to their ambitions.
No wonder we have been capturing boys and girls at battlefronts in northern Uganda and they confess having been encouraged to fight on till the magical year 2006 when these boys would be in the government army, riding Mercedes Benzes.
Encouraged by who? They mention some local councillors, chiefs, opinion leaders and elders and, my God, some Members of Parliament!
Now, as we are still trying to solve the terror-mongering in northern Uganda by abducted child fighters under the command of Joseph Kony, a ‘democrat’ has thrown a spanner into the works. On January 21, while on a radio programme called Kirizza oba ggana on the Central Broadcasting Service (CBS), the Secretary General of the Democratic Party, one Mr. J.B. Kakooza said the unsayable.
This gentleman, who is supposed to be a respectable leader, sounded war drums. He called upon all those under anyone who will remove President Museveni from government to remove the UPDF as well!
Reason? According to Kakooza, President Museveni has personalised this army and to remove him without removing it would be doing half the job. Good grief! Anybody who has been in this country for a while knows that the northern Uganda rebellion of 1986-1990, which thereafter degenerated into rural terrorism, essentially arose out of such reckless statements.
Between 1985-86, the fleeing General Bazilio Okello called upon all the Acholi to take up arms against what he called an “army of southerners”. He told our northern Uganda brothers and sisters that the army of southerners was coming to annihilate them in revenge for the UNLA fight against the NRA in Luwero and other parts of southern Uganda.
Our gullible and unsophisticated peasants believed him, since he was not only their prominent son, but also a breadwinner representing many young Acholi soldiers in the UNLA. Because of that negative propaganda by some leaders in the army and politics at the time, we have had two decades of war, terrorism, insecurity, and all the concomitant socio-economic destruction of the Acholi sub-region!
Now when the Secretary General of the Democratic Party starts conducting political business exactly like the late Bazilio Okello; where can we say Uganda is heading?
Being defeated in an election is part of democracy, even if one is the incumbent. But it can’t be part of democracy to destroy what has been built just because you don’t agree or even like your opponent, who may happen to be the incumbent.
Trying to mobilise for the destruction of the UPDF as Kakooza is doing, is to try to create an Iraq after the coalition forces removed Saddam Hussein and destroyed the one-million-strong Iraqi army.
Everyone now sees that it was bad enough to remove Saddam Hussein in the manner it was done, but it was worse to destroy the Iraqi state pillar because instead of rebuilding it, the coalition government is now trying to cut its losses and run, by organizing a “war election.”
So, the democracy they promised in Iraq is like the one Kakooza and perhaps his DP are trying to promise Ugandans, after they have, hopefully, destroyed UPDF. I am saying destroyed here because you have no other way of removing a pillar of the state, especially an armed one, without using ballistics.
So, if anyone wishes to set the fire he won’t extinguish without regrettable consequences, as we have had in northern Uganda because of the some misguided ambitious people, let him or her ask the coalition governments and armies of the Iraqi conquest.
This is certainly not to intimidate, threaten or frighten Kakooza and all those who think like him. They are free to choose and do what they want, but it is good to have a friend who warns you of the possible consequences which you may need to prepare to take responsibility for, wherever and whenever that may be, even in the longer history of our lives.
The author is Defence/UPDF Spokesman
Gook
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